BURNSIDE, WILLIAM (1852-1927), British mathemati cian, was born in London on July 2, 1852. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge. After teaching at Cambridge, Burnside was appointed, in 1885, professor of mathematics at the Royal Naval college, Greenwich, where he remained until he retired in 1919.
Burnside's earlier researches were in applied mathematics, but his later and more important work is in pure mathematics. He is the author of more than 15o papers. In his two papers on auto morphic functions (1891-92) Burnside devised a new class of function simpler than that used by Henri Poincare in his work on the periodicity of functions. This work led him to a study of the theory of groups ; he wrote a number of papers on this sub ject and collected the material into an important book, Theory of Groups of Finite Order (1897; second, enlarged edition 1909). He was the author of papers on elliptic functions, non-Euclidean geometry, kinetic theory of gases and theory of waves in liquids. One paper on probability was published in 1918 and a draft of a work on this subject was found amongst his papers after his death, which occurred on Aug. 21, 1927.
Burnside received many academic honours, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded the Royal Medal by that society in 1904.